‘I STAND By It!' Nicholas Kristof DOUBLES DOWN on NYT Israel Brutality Report - With Eric Weinstein

23:35Piers Morgan:I want them to do their jobs as they do in every war zone in the world. I mean, these are people who do this as a matter of course. I know a number of war correspondents, they've never had a situation where, particularly when it moved to a supposed ceasefire, they're still not being allowed in. I think I know why they're not being allowed in, And I'm curious whether you share my concern that there can be only one reason why a government wouldn't want journalists to operate freely when there's a ceasefire. And that is because they do not want people to know what really happened. No. So I wouldn't agree with that assessment, although there are other combat zones.

24:11And you and I have actually discussed Ukraine and the coverage that I've had in Ukraine on the front line of Ukraine where journalists aren't allowed. So it's not that this is a unique and probable answer on why isn't just what you listed. But the embeds that I have done, I'm not a reporter. I'm a war scholar. I went into Gaza multiple times, over six times. So when I was asking a division commander, what are you doing here? I'm actually also watching them operate. And to your previous guest's question, which I really want to talk about, is that you and others have pinned me as the only person, right?

24:46I'm the only one that says this thing when there's actually been four.

24:50Piers Morgan:I didn't say that. Well, he did. Your previous guest, right? So do you know Sir John McCall? I know you've been on a panel with him, right? The former deputy NATO Supreme Commander who was very skeptical, almost had similar thoughts to you, then went to Gaza, went into Gaza with six other NATO members and came out and said, no, the harm mitigation measures, which is really important because we're going to talk about post-World War II. Would you call the Korean War a genocide, Pierce? Well, I think the definition of genocide... The reason I have held off calling what happened in Gaza a genocide is because actually no country stroke state has ever been found guilty of waging a genocide.

25:31Piers Morgan:That's just a fact. As a country, right? So I think that it's important that when people throw these kind of words around, they understand what it means, and they wait for a proper adjudication by proper authorities on whether it meets the criteria for genocide. I have used the phrase ethnic cleansing because I think that is more pertinent to the language, particularly we see from certain members of the Israeli government. But let's be honest, John, when you saw that statement from Ben Gavir about Lebanon and burning it to the ground, that is the language of a genocidal maniac. It is. But I don't want to live in the world where, you know, outlier politicians that make statements that if you took them...

26:16But he's the security minister of Israel. I think Natalia Bennett replied to your ex-post and said... Yeah, but I did. But he didn't answer that point.

26:24Piers Morgan:And I replied to him saying, but hang on, this guy is the security minister for Israel. That is his job in the government. He's not a fringe member of the government. He's actually the security minister. That title, though, isn't what you're inferring. That's what Natalia Bennett, no friend of Netanyahu's said. No, no, he's not. That's more like the head of the police. he's not in the chain of command. So when you criticize that list of people, I was demonstrating that I've interviewed or observed in combat operations, both the political leaders in the chain of command and the actual field commanders operating and watching them take in unordinary, extraordinary steps that no military has done.

27:04But do you think, John, on that point, do you - But Piers, you said post-World War II. Can I answer that really quick? Sure, sure, sure. Because you said the Korean War, right? So, yes, things that we did in World War II, Dresden, even the Blitz of—we don't do that anymore, right? The Geneva Conventions. The Korean War was a 37-month war. Two million civilians were killed in that war. That's 54 ,000 civilians a month, every month of the war. 2 ,000 civilians a day. More than actual combatants. these numbers, these lies, damn lies, statistics, even if we want to talk about the numbers of children, which is, according to the United Nations, anybody below the age of 18, half of the population of Gaza is below the age of 18, and Hamas is historic for deploying soldiers from 12 to 18.

27:54The average age of a Hamas recruit right now is 16. But do you believe, okay, but John,

27:58Piers Morgan:do you believe that the ratio of civilian deaths to enemy combatant terrorist deaths in Gaza, for example, is the best ratio, if you like, that we've seen in modern warfare? Is that your belief? And so I stated that early in the war when there were people doing false comparative analysis. Do you still believe that about Gaza? Absolutely. OK, so my question for you is very simple, then. It's an aggregated... OK, but my question for you is very simple. Here's, what is the... Hang on, John, let me finish my question. I will let you answer, but because you've said that, let me just give you my question, which is this.

28:37Piers Morgan:Sure. To make that assessment, you would have to know how many civilians have been killed, wouldn't you? Yep. So how many is it? So I take both the numbers that we all have available. I just don't filter them through some prism of intentionality and already criticising people. But no pro-Israeli guest has been able to tell me the numbers, so maybe you can enlighten everybody. How many civilians have been killed in Gaza? Sure. So I take the Hamas number that they provide, which doesn't distinguish between civilian and combatants, and then I take the one that Israel provides. I have done enough research on all the numbers of any urban battle to understand when do we have a number and then how is it determined...

29:22Sure. So how many civilians have been killed? According to Hamas, 72 ,000. And what is your belief? My belief is that we don't have a number, but if we take Hamas's number and then we compare it to Israel's numbers of combatants, how many fighters do you think Hamas has, God?

29:40Piers Morgan:Well, okay, let's take the Israel number of combatants. So I've asked Israeli ambassadors how many civilians have been killed. They can always tell me how many Hamas have been killed. That's right. But they can never tell me... You know why they can't tell you how many civilians have died? But oddly, oddly, they can never tell me how many civilians have been killed. So my simple question for you is to make the assessment that the ratio has never been better than it is in Gaza in terms of combatants killed compared to civilians. You'd have to know both numbers. You have to. So my question, again, is simple.

30:12Piers Morgan:How many civilians have actually been killed in Gaza? So that would be a question... You don't know, do you? You don't know. So when people talk about how many civilians have died, You just started this show talking about an indiscriminate number, a high number of civilians. You, too, don't have access to information to know that that body... No, but you're the one making the claim that the ratio is the best we've seen. I don't think it's unreasonable. I don't think it's unreasonable, John, in that context of that claim, to simply ask you that, obviously, to make that assessment, you must know how many civilians have been killed and how many Hamas terrorists have been killed.

30:53Piers Morgan:If you don't know, I don't know how you can make the assessment. I mean, I guess you could challenge the qualitative analysis of any war in the history of war. I'm only asking about your claim. You said it was the best ratio, and yet I'm simply asking you, OK, so what is the ratio? How many civilians? How many Hamas? And I'm trying to explain to you the qualitative analysis. Do you know the answer or not? Yes. What is it? It is based on Hamas's number. Just give me a number of civilians who've been killed. that for you to make your judgment that the ratio is the best in modern times, OK, that's your claim.

31:30Piers Morgan:I respect your right to have a claim. But to back it up, you have to know the two numbers. You have to better tell me this number of civilians were killed and this number of Hamas. And then we can all decide whether that is the best ratio in modern times. But if you don't know, now's your chance to say, actually, I don't know. Because I don't think you do, do you? So that's an interesting viewpoint. if you didn't know that I'm comparing the numbers we all have available to the same numbers that we all have available in any battle of war. So how many civilians have been killed? You said you're a scholar of war.

32:04Piers Morgan:So as a scholar of war who says the ratio has never been better, one last time, how many civilians have been killed? So let's talk in the Battle of Rafa. No, no, let's talk about in Gaza since October 7th, in the war, how many civilians have been killed? If you just do literally like my kindergartner math of the numbers that are available and subtract the number of combatants, because there are no civilians in war, it appears. There's combatants or non-combatants. Non-combatants are those that are not participating in the war, such as in Gaza. If you're holding a civilian and you're a doctor. John, just to be clear, do you have a number or not?

32:4850 ,000 minus the number of combatants that the IDF have set. 50 ,000 is what? What number is that? It is the number that Hamas says is leftover of the number of combatants that Israel says. Sorry, so just to be clear, how many...

33:04Piers Morgan:You don't want to use the word civilians. How many non-combatants have been killed? I'm struggling to get my head round your maths. According to Hamas, all of the deaths are non-combatants. OK. So how many do you think... 72 ,000, according to Hamas... How many do you think it is? it's less the number that Israel has publicly. I mean, to have said the ratio's the best we've seen, you've got to know the number. And if you don't know the number, obviously your assessment is bullshit. Piers, so, sure, if the entire history of war is bullshit, every case... I'm not talking about the entire history of war.

33:41Piers Morgan:You said you're a war scholar. You've been to Gaza six times. You have stated the ratio is the best we've seen. I've asked you multiple times. how many civilians have been killed, and you don't know. Therefore, you don't know the ratio. Therefore, your assessment is bullshit.

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34:33Sure, Piers.

34:34Piers Morgan:The entire study of war is bullshit. I wasn't talking about the entire study of war. I was simply talking about the war in Gaza. John Spencer, thank you very much. No, no, but you say siblings have died. I gave you multiple chances to answer, and you couldn't answer. But I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you very much. Well, as we discussed earlier, the Vice President's tough talk on Israel has earned him the ire of many of the Iran war's most ardent cheerleaders. Dr. Eric Weinstein is both a friend of the Vice President and a supporter of Israel. And I'm delighted to say he joins me in the studio.

35:03Eric!

35:04Piers Morgan:Piers, great to be here. It's like having a state visit.

35:07Eric Weinstein:Normally I'm put into a mysterious van and I never know if I'll emerge.

35:12Piers Morgan:You were very Eric when you arrived. You looked at me and said, God, you've got a massive head. But then you caveated it by saying, obviously if you had one that big, you would have a lot of brain in it. Well, I've clearly played in a second. It's great to see you. You're in London to take part in the ARC Conference, which is Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Now, this is an annual gathering that unites thought leaders from around the world to promote traditional Western values, free enterprise and individual responsibility. Now, there are a lot of people in America who have been led down a path, I think wrongly, that London, in particular, it's the kind of epicentre of the end of Western civilisation as we know it, that we've been overrun by marauding foreigners, particularly Muslims, and there's no way back.

36:01Piers Morgan:We're under siege, we're collapsing, blah, blah, blah. I live in London. I have done since I was 20 years old. I don't recognise this characterisation of my city. Do you sense that when you're here? The food got a lot better. Yeah, it did. It did.

36:17Eric Weinstein:Yeah, I mean, I think Edgeware Road, you know, has been an epicenter of great cuisine. And I think London's gotten a lot more interesting. I think what people are really reacting to is things that they don't know how to talk about. And so as they react, they become less good versions of themselves. I think one thing is that there was a sense that during the Tony Blair era, there were forces reshaping the society that nobody seemed to have asked for. I think that that's true. I do think that there was a lot of binge immigration. immigration. So one of the great features of the UK is that there's a UK software product that you could load onto anyone's shoulders.

36:54Eric Weinstein:We have like Stephen Bartlett, who certainly doesn't look like a traditional Anglo-Saxon in the US, but comes across as perfectly British. And so part of what the problem is, I believe, is that you took in too many people too quickly, didn't give enough time for the assimilation, because nobody wants to lose that special quality that is British sensibility. I don't think we care quite so much as to who's running the program on which computers, but that would be an absolute tragedy.

37:24Piers Morgan:And what's interesting, I mean, like, you know, there's absolute merit to that. It's what most people, I would say, genuinely feel concerned about. We've let too many people in too fast. And it has changed the way our country feels to people. But how do we deal with this in a way where the solution is not a kind of anti-reaction to having foreigners in our country, where if they come from a different culture, they're the enemy and we've got to get rid of them all?

37:54Eric Weinstein:Sure. I mean, I think part of... So, I mean, I have an unorthodox piece of advice. I brought two cab drivers to tears crossing London this trip. And not giving them a tip? Well, I certainly tried that. By speaking in rudimentary Urdu and being unflinching about the problems. Yeah, sure. And I think that, for example, a lot of what's going wrong in the UK is that you're talking around your Muslim population rather than talking to them, because many of them are incredibly ashamed of some of the things that are being ascribed to all Muslims. Right. Right? And so, you know, strangely enough, I had a Bangladeshi cab driver last night who knew some Hindi and some Urdu.

38:43Eric Weinstein:And, you know, he basically spent his whole life here. And when I tried communicating with him, I managed to tell him that my wife's uncle had taken the surrender of East Pakistan as a Jewish general in the Indian Army. And had not accepted the surrender of the sidearm of this surrendering general because they wanted to preserve honor. And he says, why am I so emotional? Why am I crying? How do I keep in touch with you? I think that, you know, in many ways, the problem is if you're going to let in all of these people, it's time to go back to being the UK. The UK used to have a foreign service that prided itself by understanding every culture with which the British Empire was in contact.

39:26Eric Weinstein:And my feeling is that more traditional white Anglo-Saxon English and the like need to learn the languages of the subpopulation, communicate directly to them, and also learn the sort of ethnic sensibilities. Because shame and family are powerful ways to restore order. I think that by poking a hole in the social order to defend the imagined racism, you're going to create real racism. There's something, if the landing pictures at Heathrow spoke of British confidence and strength rather than see how diverse we are, you would look less pathetic. You look somewhat pathetic from overseas.

40:11Piers Morgan:Yeah, and I think it's not helped that we've had seven prime ministers in 10 years, which is clearly ridiculous. Right. It's ridiculous. I mean, it just shows a rudderless country, doesn't it?

40:21Eric Weinstein:But you really do have to deal with the fact that the grooming gang thing was... Let's assume it's exaggerated. There's a core of truth there that if we don't actually stare...

40:35Piers Morgan:It undeniably happened. And it undermined... Thousands of young, almost exclusively young white girls were raped and abused by almost exclusively gangs of British Pakistani Muslim men. That is inarguable. The stuff that is problematic to me is that you get people with their own agendas who suddenly come out with their own report which says 250 ,000 girls were raped. That's not a fact. That's just them extrapolating certain numbers and guessing. And I think people should be more precise about what is factual, which we know from the investigations, how many have been arrested, how many times they were accused of committing crimes and so on, which is a huge number.

41:18Piers Morgan:The whole thing is disgraceful. And the cover-up was completely disgraceful. But I do think it's important that we don't then wildly exaggerate with guesswork when you've got a real set of details you can tackle.

41:31Eric Weinstein:I, in many ways, agree and disagree. The problem is that when you indulge in what I would call the hyper-liberal form of illiberalism, where you have an exaggerated liberalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just tolerant of everything. You are consigning the next generation to hypo-liberalism, which is what you and I are also... I mean, I sense we are in violent agreement.

41:56Piers Morgan:I think we are. We are. There's no question. I mean, I try to explain to people, the grooming gang scandal was a horrendous scandal on a very widespread level. It went on for many years. There was a cover-up from top to bottom of law enforcement, of authority, of politicians, of police and so on, and it was a complete disgrace. And it was dumb because people didn't want to say who was doing these crimes and operating in these gangs and who they were doing them to for fear that it would create racial tension. When, of course, by not dealing with it, it's created way more racial tension. Exactly what you would have expected.

42:30Piers Morgan:So it had the opposite effect to what they thought that their cowardly cover-up actions would create.

42:37Eric Weinstein:I like what you're saying. I fear that there was more social engineering going on our side of the pond with the Clintons and your side of the pond with Tony Blair. And I still think we don't know the source of it. I was able to, for example, trace some of the hyper-liberal immigration in the sciences to 1986 secret study of the NSF where the National Science Foundation was plotting to lower the wages of American scientists using an invidious mechanism of visas as payment where visas are no good to anyone who's actually a native. And so what you see is high trust is even more important than diversity to a society.

43:19Eric Weinstein:When you undermine high trust...

43:21Piers Morgan:I totally agree.

43:22Eric Weinstein:...then the problem is that you open it up to say, I have no idea what's true, and I heard this from my friend at the bar.

43:29Piers Morgan:Well, never has this been more pertinent, I think, than with the Iran war, where it's almost impossible to know what is really going on or who is telling the truth. Now, I say that in the context that J.D. Vance, the vice president, has become the poster boy for this war on the Trump administration side. Obviously, it's a deliberate thing. He's been out there trying to sell this deal, explain what's going on. You know him well. I want to play a clip from J.D. Vance, which is quite critical of Israel. I think it's quite interesting. Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.

44:10And he happens to be the head of state of the world's superpower. If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.

44:23Piers Morgan:You reacted to this by posting on X. Israel, which I love, needs to snap out of its delirium ASAP. J.D. Vance is sending a message. Israel needs to listen, not respond, not argue, but listen. Bibi needs to be out of office. The new PM needs to understand that hybrid war slash cheap drones and missiles changed everything, which I completely concur with. You know, it's been fascinating to me to see this utter disconnect between Netanyahu and his government, particularly fuelled by these, to me, psychopaths of Ben Givir and Smodredge, that as Israel's reputation around the world has got steadily worse, to the extent that the majority of Americans have a negative view of Israel, and I think it's predominantly driven by the rhetoric of these guys and the actions of this government, that no-one there seems to either get it or care.

45:17Piers Morgan:Is that a fair characterisation?

45:20Eric Weinstein:I think there are people who care who don't get it. There may be people who get it who don't care. And I would put forward the following. Let me say some outrageous stuff. Yes, please. Come on, Eric. This is largely a UK problem. This is a problem of the legacy of Operation Boot. And MI6 really did a number on Iran over the nationalization of oil back in the 50s. and we are looking at the long tail of that. And the MI6 and the UK that did that doesn't exist anymore. The two countries that best understand the clerical threat in Iran are Israel and the United States. And right now, because they are so out of keeping with the rest of the world, those two countries are correct and the rest of the world is not getting it.

46:12Eric Weinstein:Let me tell you a terrible joke. How do you say London and Farsi? Go on. Diego Garcia. I'm telling you. It's not a good joke. Yeah, but the point is they've just communicated that they can reach you. You underestimated their reach. And in their framework, they're not psychopaths. They're extraordinarily skilled players. But in our framework, their belief in an afterlife, in the idea that religious life is at the center of government, you're dealing with a game theory of players that you will not be able to control. and who can reach Europe and who will be able... You know, there's an unfortunate term associated with pornography called edging.

46:56Eric Weinstein:They have been edging for decades that they are a short distance away from a nuclear weapon. And that has become a claim. The claim is, oh, it's Chicken Little, we've always... No, no, they are always close to...

47:09Piers Morgan:But there are unstable countries who have nuclear weapons. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. North Korea has nuclear weapons. And the answer is that people don't go and invade them or try and overthrow their regimes, right? I mean, we look at... Iran's been dealt with it in a different way. And from where I'm looking, 16, 17 weeks in since the war started, to me it's been a disaster.

47:34Eric Weinstein:Well, they had one plan. And the one plan was we have a one-time opportunity to decapitate this regime. And had they done that during the 12-day war, it probably would have worked. But Iran is so skilled. I have such respect, even for my enemies. Grudging respect, I agree, yeah. Yeah, so what I would say is that they did something no one counted on, but works in the Iranian mindset. The clerics didn't say, OK, we're going to get hit again. How do we save ourselves? They said, you know what, they're probably going to wipe us all out. They've demonstrated an ability to do it. How do we make sure that our regime survives our own deaths?

48:10Eric Weinstein:So rather than trying to save their own lives, they decentralize.

48:13Piers Morgan:But didn't they also work out very quickly that they had it turned out the most potent weapon of all? And it was the Strait of Hormuz. And if they combined that with attacking their Gulf state neighbors with a few missiles and rockets, they actually held everybody quite literally over a barrel. And the worst thing about this deal is that it looks to me like they will maintain the ability to turn that Strait on and off with impunity. And there's not much anyone can do about it.

48:40Eric Weinstein:Well, I do have to say that Straits Hormuz and Taiwan are probably the two most gamed scenarios among people who speculate on such things. So this certainly wasn't a question that hadn't been considered. Everybody's done it to death. I think that what's really going on is that there was one plan, which is one and done. It's going to be a lightning fast decapitation. And then all the people who were rioting back in December, January will rise up. But the CIA and the Mossad didn't run them guns. And they found that there was always more support for the regime in Iran than in Tarantulas, as we call it, people claim.

49:25Eric Weinstein:And as a result of this, we probably got the first step right and we thought there would be no second step. And, you know, the problem is that Israel is wrong about some stuff here, more right about the danger of Iran than anyone else. It was a botched, ham-fisted operation in terms of the follow-on. The initial thing was executed to a fare thee well. So you have this complicated mix. And we've taught people that you can only think in simplicities. Oh, Netanyahu is holding something on Trump and is actually secretly in control of the U.S. Not true. But did Netanyahu paint a picture of what could happen,

50:07Piers Morgan:as the New York Times reported quite early on in the war, that just manifestly turned out not to be accurate? In other words, if you decapitate the top, then the IRGC collapses from within, the people rise up. It's all reasonably straightforward. None of the rest of it happened. Right. And it seemed to me as the weeks and months went on, Trump began to realise it wasn't going to happen. And then how do you extricate yourself from what has become a real mess? Now, he took a decision in that moment. It seems to me, well, J.D. Vance can deal with a fallout of this. You know Vance really well. What's going on here?

50:41Piers Morgan:I mean, is that something that Vance will be comfortable about doing? Because this deal doesn't seem to be pleasing pretty much anybody. Will he be comfortable? Is he being set up for a fall here?

50:54Eric Weinstein:I refuse to speculate. I'm just going to opt out of certain things because I have a personal connection to J.D. Vance, which I'm not going to share with your audience. What I believe is, is that he's in an extremely tough spot. He chose his words very well. He's associated with the so-called America First wing of MAGA, which is actually a reboot of a Nazi-adjacent movement to stay out of World War II, associated with Lindbergh and the Klan. J.D., I don't think, is a bigoted person, but I believe that he has taken the sense that Americans have that they don't create their own foreign policy. Unfortunately, we have mimetic terms like forever wars that are really not good terms that capture something, but they also distort just as they elucidate.

51:42Eric Weinstein:And as a result, he's stuck in a situation where the population has had a sort of self-inflicted 25-point IQ loss inside the U.S., and he's trying to send a message to the insane, like, Ben Givir, I have no idea what that guy is thinking. I do know Israelis pretty well. They have a very strong sense that in order to live in that neighbourhood, you have to understand the calculus of the local mindset.

52:11Piers Morgan:Yeah, but when Ben Givir issues a statement in which he says all Lebanon must burn, that is, he's just advocating genocide. He's saying the whole country has got to burn. I mean, he says it in his own words. And he's not like, as they try and make out he's some sort of irrelevance, he's the security minister.

52:31Eric Weinstein:In Yiddish, we'd call him a peskudniak. He's a terrible person. Yes.

52:34Piers Morgan:Right. But I don't think he's good enough for the pro-Israeli side, as they've tried to do. I've left Ali Bennett challenging who I like. I think he's come on my show a number of times. I think he's got a really good chance of being prime minister, and I hope he is. But he challenged me and said, look, ignore Ben Gavir. He's irrelevant. I was like, he's the national security minister.

52:53Eric Weinstein:He's in a very tough spot. He needs to be silenced and he can't be silenced. I'd rather have a more honest conversation given that I'm in London with you. Sure. And my feeling is that you have to understand the Israeli mindset, first of all, not just of your opponents, which is, that is the language of the region. And very often it's bluster, and sometimes it isn't. And nobody knows exactly, because in order for bluster to work, you have to have a question. Does he actually believe the stupid thing that he just said? Let's go farther. There is tremendous suspicion in Israel of American and other diaspora Jews that we are weak, that we don't understand the calculus, that we believe that you can replace the Judaism of either belief in God or picking up a gun and sending your children to war with something called tikkun olam and nice thoughts about healing the world, sort of the equivalent of thoughts and prayers.

53:48Eric Weinstein:And so in a certain way, what Israel is trying to communicate is, please don't tell us how to survive, because if we listened to you, we would have been dead 10 times over. And Israel is not wrong about that. And so in part, the world is also using Israel to work out their own frustrations. I mean, here you have effectively an indigenous people come home. You've got this incredible expanding colonial empire in green from Morocco to Pakistan. And you have this question about immediately after October 7th, there was enthusiasm. And so in part, Jews have this other idea, which is there's nothing we can do about the outside world.

54:30Eric Weinstein:The outside world has lost its mind. And in part, you know, everything that...

54:34Piers Morgan:Much of the outside world thinks that Israel has currently lost its mind, or rather its government has lost its mind. E.B.

54:43Eric Weinstein:Netanyahu has failed quite badly. He's an extremely skilled politician. He's tough as nails. And you have to appreciate that if you're asking me, I'm going to tell you this good, this bad, this true, this not true. But right now what we're having is we're having a moronic discussion. If I go online and I say anything at all, I've got four or five tweets that use the word genocide from some sort of bot network. So we're all losing our mind because everything's distorted.

55:13Piers Morgan:But the problem, because I've avoided using the word genocide, for example, about what happened in Gaza.

55:18Eric Weinstein:It's completely incorrect.

55:19Piers Morgan:Well, because, I mean, as widely known, no country or state has ever been convicted of waging a genocide. It's just a fact. So why would you start actually, if it didn't in Rwanda, for example, why would people start with what happened in Gaza? However, however, I think a lot of bad stuff has happened in Gaza, and I think it's reprehensible that Netanyahu won't let international journalists in freely to investigate it. And he must be covering something up, otherwise he'd let them in. I don't think so.

55:50Eric Weinstein:Well, I think he is. No, but let me give you a counter-argument. The counter-argument is that the rest of the world is not thinking rationally. We never talk about the Tokyo genocide at the end of World War II. We don't talk about the Dresden genocide. When we talk about the...

56:07Piers Morgan:Well, we do, but in the context of the Geneva Convention, we brought in precisely to stop these kind of things happening again.

56:13Eric Weinstein:No, but my point is that when we, when it was the UK and the US, we hit them hard. And we had to hit them hard and disproportionately.

56:23Piers Morgan:But there wasn't, there was an acceptance after World War II, but notwithstanding that, the Geneva Convention was brought in, agreed by myriad countries to avoid things like the carpet bombing of Dresden, all the dropping of atomic bombs and so on.

56:37Eric Weinstein:Let's talk about the resettlement of the Sudeten Germans, which was not called ethnic cleansing, because ethnic cleansing, if I remember correctly, is a Romanian phrase that came into currency in the 1980s. And quite honestly, everyone is supposed to be smart enough to know that you have to relocate people at times so that you don't have a re-inflicting war.

56:57Piers Morgan:The problem, it seems to me, for Israel in terms of PR to the world is that on the one hand, there's this vehement denial of genocide being waged in Gaza. Correct. OK. But then you have the national security minister literally, in his own words, advocating genocide in Lebanon. 100%. So the rest of the world doesn't understand, perhaps, the subtle nuances of politics in Israel. They just see a senior member of the Israeli government who is openly calling for genocide. He's a madman. But therefore, the problem for Israel is that a lot of people go, well, they obviously are genocidal maniacs. Look at the security minister.

57:35Piers Morgan:He just wants to wipe out the whole of Lebanon.

57:37Eric Weinstein:And I hope that that pressure causes Israel to throw that guy out of government, never to be seen again. But Netanyahu won't throw him out because he's the reason he got back into power. And if you remember what I said in my post on X, it's that Netanyahu has to go. Yeah, I agree. So, you know, again, my point isn't that your intuitions are wrong. My claim is, as a Jew who has lived in Israel, who is left of centre, has lots of friends in the administration, I'm in a much more complicated position to see all sorts of different angles. And if you want my take on it, overall, the simplicity with which we've been taught that we can address these questions is the abomination.

58:18Eric Weinstein:Israel is in an extraordinary position. It has to use techniques that it doesn't want to use. We should talk about them. We don't know how. Like collective punishment is the problem of how do you disincentivize a suicide bomber who's already willing to give his or her life and maybe even as a child in order to inflict pain. So a lot of our go to shorthands for we don't want ethnic cleansing. I agree. We don't want collective punishment. We don't want this. We don't want that. We like the press. Now you've got an enemy who's using press credentials in part as cover. You've got people building tunnels under hospitals and mosques.

58:54Eric Weinstein:and old age homes, not because... Wait, wait, one second. Not because they are human shields. That's completely misunderstood. Sinwar is much more impressive. What he did was he said, you will have to bomb these tunnels and what we want is the video. This is the point I made in that tweet, is that hybrid war means that the video of Israeli bombs falling on a hospital or a mosque or an old age home or anything like that is worth so much more in a dumb world, consuming video in a particular way, that Sinwar, and this is painful to admit, completely outsmarted his Jewish adversaries who pride themselves on intelligence and strategy.

59:34Piers Morgan:But Trump was right, wasn't he, last week, I think, when he said, look, the problem is going after one Hezbollah guy, two Hezbollah guys, and taking down an entire apartment block is ridiculous. If you keep doing that, I mean, I think it's ridiculous for a different reason to Trump, which is that I don't think this makes the lives of Israelis any safer. I think the opposite. I think it creates more enemies over time. If you are, you know, do I think Israel deliberately targets civilians? I don't. I don't either. Do I think that they target lone terrorists, little group of terrorists, and don't care about how many civilians are killed in the process of that targeting?

1:00:16Piers Morgan:Yes, I do. And I think we've seen that again and again in Gaza. We've seen it a lot in southern Lebanon now. And we're also seeing at the same time this appalling, aggressive expansion of settlements on the West Bank with terrible stuff going on, which is clearly war crimes.

1:00:31Eric Weinstein:So you have... I have no question that every war has atrocities, and then when you put a bunch of young kids who watch their friend get blown to pieces are going to act in ways that are terrible. This is also true. So it's not just a question of they don't care. I'm sure that there's some vengeance aspect to it. I don't agree that Israel doesn't care about civilian casualties. They do, but they are definitely, to your point, willing to kill a bunch of civilians. There's a particular calculus of how much can you afford, which the rest of us don't have to consider. My point in all of this, Pierce, is that the rest of us have been at peace for so long that we have forgotten what war is.

1:01:11Eric Weinstein:We think of war as a war crime. Israel is fed up with all of us saying, look, we have to survive. But, you know, if you want my Israel critical perspective, when you don't show up for the hybrid side of a hybrid war that involves PR, presaging what you're going to do, telegraphing, here's how this is going to take place. You're going to be extremely upset. We're going to have the following things. If you recall with my tweets, right after October 7th, before Israel invaded, I said this is Monkhausen by proxy. Right. And you have a guy who's going to try to get as many atrocities as he can possibly get, real or optical, on video.

1:01:52Eric Weinstein:And, you know, if I pat myself on the back, it took me a little while because he's so damn smart. And one of the things that I really miss is that the Ariel Sharon's of the world really knew the mind of their enemy. They lived in the region. And if you want to look, you know, look at Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem. There's a chapter called Hama Rules about disproportionate violence as a language. When Israel gets tarred with the question of this violence is disproportionate. If Israel only engaged in a proportion of violence, it would cease to exist.

1:02:25Piers Morgan:Just before we finish, I just want to ask you about quantum mania. So you're actually in the UK in your capacity as a financial expert. And many people think... I had Andrew Ross-Hulkin on last week talking about his book, 1929, and whether there are parallels, and he said there are clear parallels. As we're meeting today, there's a big sell-off in tech stocks. We've seen SpaceX skyrocket and now falling back. Musk became a trillionaire, but even he's not impervious to what's going on here. Quantum media, what is that in simple terms? What is quantum mania? What is this?

1:03:01Eric Weinstein:Well, in part, it has to do with technology. The quantum sounds like it should be more physics, but it's really an attempt to use the particular properties that we've considered to be mysterious or even defects of the quantum theory as a technological edge. So the idea that one can encode more information in a qubit with continuous degrees of freedom than zero and one. and the idea that certain things would be easier in a different style of computer. So in part, what we're talking about is can we break into your encryption and read your love letters, your customer database, and your secret plans to attack?

1:03:42Eric Weinstein:And so what I find amazing, of course, is that the administration in the U.S. has forgotten that science exists. So in general, if you look at their appointments to PCAST, the Presidential Council of Advisors in Science and Technology, There were 13, 12 of which were like billionaires and technologists, and one guy was a scientist. So at the moment, we have this weird feature where none of these rich people seem to know any actual scientists. They're not comfortable. They don't dine together. The poorness and precariousness of academic scientists means that they don't vacation in the same places.

1:04:19Eric Weinstein:And as a result, the U.S. is basically committing harakiri. and it is consigning itself to lose its status as the world's scientific superpower. What we've decided instead is that you can only trust people who are motivated by money because Lord knows what a scientist is motivated by. It might be truth, beauty, fairness, who knows?

1:04:41Piers Morgan:Could we face another 29-style depression, a proper crash?

1:04:46Eric Weinstein:You are dealing with something so much more powerful. I mean, my belief is that we are holding no conferences that I'm aware of, capable of dealing with the change mediated in neoclassical economic production theory with the move to AI. We've never had any technology chase so many people out. We always said, you know, you can go the next rung up if your rung becomes automated. But this is an old problem, sort of like the Hilbert Hotel, where if you tell everyone move one room, you know, At some level, you just keep getting chased by the AI infinitely up the value ladder. If Karl Marx and Adam Smith were in a room today, they wouldn't be going back to communism and capitalism.

1:05:32Eric Weinstein:They'd be saying, my God, we just traded everything we know about capital and labor as inputs to production for some unknown new system. And we're not trying to found a new economic theory. And I am absolutely bewildered. Why are we not convening everybody, given that the labour market's about to be completely obliterated? I hope it's only as bad as 1929.

1:05:56Piers Morgan:Do you know what? I share your concerns about that. I think, to me, it's obvious that's going to be the big thing, and we're not dealing with it properly. Eric, I could talk to you, as always, for hours. We've run out of time, but thank you very much. It's great to see you. Great to finally meet you. Next time you're in town, let's catch a bite to eat, and I'll put the world to rights with you. terrific sir good to see you Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent the only boss around here is me if you enjoy our show we ask for only one simple thing hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and in return we will continue our mission to inform irritate and entertain and we'll do it all for free independent uncensored media has never been more critical and we couldn't do it without you See you next time.

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